The Proud Tower (34 page)

The Dreyfusard cause, too, had its opportunists. Urbain Gohier, an ex-monarchist who now professed to be a Socialist, lashed at the Army in
l’Aurore.
Its officers were “generals of debacle,” “Kaiserlicks” who knew nothing but “flight and surrender” and brought no victories except over the French; they were “the cavalry of Sodom” with retinues’ of kept women. “One half of France is slinging invective at the other,” worriedly wrote the French-born Princess Radziwill, née de Castellane, from Berlin. Married to Prince Anton Radziwill, the Prussian member of an international family of Polish origin who “loves to talk English while his brother, a Russian, talks French,” she had dedicated herself to a goal of Franco-German rapprochement. “No one can see how it will finish,” her letter continued, “but it cannot go on like this without real moral danger.”

The danger was more than moral. Germany watched carefully the internal conflict that absorbed all France’s attention. Her periodic denials of dealings with Dreyfus were designed less in the interest of justice than of aggravating French dissension. Happy in the consciousness of innocence, the Kaiser was not reluctant to inform visitors and royal relatives that France had convicted an innocent man. Through the family international of European royalty the word spread. In St. Petersburg in August, 1897, when the case had not yet become the Affair in France, Count Witte, the leading Russian minister, said to a member of a visiting French mission, “I can see only one thing that could cause great trouble in your country. It is this business of a captain condemned three years ago who is innocent”

The assumption so carelessly taken for granted in St. Petersburg was passionately rejected in the French Chamber in December by a sincere and honorable man of lofty ideals. To Comte Albert de Mun the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus was infused with another meaning; transformed, no less than the bread and wine of the sacrament, into another nature. Belief in Dreyfus’ guilt was belief in God.

The fusion of these ideas lay in the condition of chronic war between the Church and the Republic. Since the Revolution, the Church had been on the defensive against the purpose of the Republic in the words of Jules Ferry, “to organize mankind without God or King.” The religious orders, furiously resisting the effort of the Republic to displace them from control of education, saw their hope of survival in restoration of the Catholic monarchy. This was what brought the Church in France into position in the Affair. It was the ally of the Army in its own mind as well as in Republican propaganda, which always linked “the Sword and the Censer.” In the Jesuits the Republic saw the militant and aggressive general staff of clericalism who pulled the strings which moved the Dreyfus plot. The Jesuit leader was Father du Lac, confessor of both General Boisdeffre and the Comte de Mun, who were regarded as his mouthpieces.

To Pope Leo XIII, a realist looking on from outside, it seemed possible the Republic was here to stay. After the collapse of the Boulanger coup he could no longer believe that restoration of the monarchy was a serious possibility. Besides, he needed French support in his struggle with the Italian state. In the Encyclical of 1892 he urged French Catholics to reconcile themselves to the Republic, to support, infiltrate and ultimately capture it, in a policy called the
Ralliement.
Catholic progressives rallied, others did not and the Left did not trust the policy. “You accept the Republic,” said Léon Bourgeois, leader of the Radicals to a meeting of Ralliés. “Very well. Do you accept the Revolution?” De Mun was one who never had.

When, in the midst of the Affair, de Mun arrived at the peak of a French career—election to the French Academy—he chose Counter-Revolution as the theme of his address. The Revolution, he proclaimed, was “the cause and origin of all the evils of the century”; it was “the revolt of man against God.” He believed the ancient ideals and ideas were about to “reappear in our time with irresistible evolution” and revive “the social concepts of the Thirteenth Century.” To heal the wounds of social injustice under which the working class suffered and re-Christianize the masses alienated by the Revolution had been the goal of his political career.

As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town. During the Commune, as an aide to General Galliffet, who commanded the battalion that fired on the insurgent Communards, he saw a dying man brought in on a litter. The guard said he was an “insurgent,” whereupon the man, raising himself up, cried with his last strength, “No, it is you who are the insurgents!” and died. In the force of that cry directed at himself, his uniform, his family, his Church, de Mun had recognized the reason for civil war and vowed himself to heal the cleavage. He blamed the Commune on “the apathy of the bourgeois class and the ferocious hatred for society of the working class.” The responsible ones, he had been told by one of the St. Vincent brothers, were “you, the rich, the great, the happy ones of life who pass by the people without seeing them.” To see and discover them de Mun had worked among the poor. “It is not enough to perceive the wrong and know its cause,” he said. “We must admit ourselves responsible and confess that society has failed in its duty toward the working class.” He determined to enter politics but his candidacy for the Chamber and his activities had been resented in the Army. Forced to choose, he had resigned his commission and broken his sword.

Yet in the Chamber his love for the Army remained and formed the theme of his most stirring speeches. Delivered with the adoration of a disciple and the fire of a champion, they made him known as
le cuirassier mystique.
He was the finest orator of his side, “the Jaurès of the Right,” who brought to perfection the carefully taught art of the spoken word. A tall figure of dignified bearing, controlled gestures and exquisite manners, he was incomparable in authority when he rose to his feet. He spoke with force of conviction and conscious architecture of phrase, using his voice like a violin, sonorous and vibrant or muted and trembling, in long harmonious rhythms, sudden broken stops and eloquent perorations. His oratorical duels against two major opponents, Clemenceau and Jaurès, were spectacles of style and drama which audiences attended as they would Sarah Bernhardt playing
l’Aiglon.

Although diehards accused him of being a Socialist and of encouraging subversive ideas and disturbing the established order, his essential loyalties were those of his class. He had been a supporter of Boulanger and until 1892 a royalist of sufficient stature to have the Comte de Chambord
^*
as godparent for one of his children. When Leo XIII, however, called for the
Ralliement
, although most French royalists were stunned and rebellious, de Mun renounced royalist politics—if not sympathies—to become a leader of the Ralliés. Although his aim was social justice, he rejected Socialism as the “negation of the authority of God while we are its affirmation.… Socialism affirms the independence of man and we deny it.… Socialism is logical Revolution and we are Counter-Revolution. There is nothing in common between us and between us there is no place for liberalism.”

His words defined the chasm, and his position on one side of it was inevitable. It led him in the Affair to embrace the brigands and fight on the terms established by Drumont. It was he who introduced the “Syndicate” into the first debate on the Affair in the Chamber. “What is this mysterious occult power,” he demanded, looking directly at Reinach, “that is strong enough to disrupt the entire country as it has for the last two weeks and to throw doubt and suspicion on the leaders of our Army who”—here he stopped as if choked by his strength of feeling—“who may one day have to lead the country against the enemy. This is not a question of politics. Here we are neither friends nor opponents of the Government; here there are only Frenchmen anxious to preserve their most precious possession … the honor of the Army!”

His proud manner and thrilling voice brought the deputies to their feet in transports of applause. Reinach felt the entire Chamber swept by an overmastering emotion and incapable of individual reflection. “I felt on my head the hatred of three hundred hypnotized listeners. I crossed my arms; one word, one movement would have transformed this frenzy into fury. How struggle against a whirlwind?” Jaurès was silent and many of the Left were applauding from “the enthusiasm born of fear.” Imperiously de Mun demanded from the Government an unequivocal statement confirming Dreyfus’ guilt. The Minister of War, General Billot, obeyed, declaring “solemnly and sincerely, as a soldier and leader of the Army, I believe Dreyfus to be guilty.” The Premier followed with an appeal to all good Frenchmen, in the interests of the country and the Army, to support the Government “struggling with such difficulties and harassed by such furious passions.” The passions were at once expressed in a duel between Reinach and Alexandre Millerand, a Socialist, who in unprecedented support for the Government by one of his party, denounced the Dreyfusard accusations of the Army as “disloyal.”

Other members of the nobility besides de Mun also served as deputies, but always as royalists in opposition. None took any share in the actual business of governing under the Republic. Among them was the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, representing the older nobility ante-dating the Empire, whose money came from Pommeroy champagne and Singer sewing machines and who, as president of the Jockey Club, was the acknowledged leader of the
gratin
, or “crust,” of French Society. Others were the Marquis de Breteuil, representing a district in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his friend the Comte de Greffulhe, whose yellow beard and air of combined rage and majesty caused him to resemble the king in a pack of cards. Possessor of one of the largest fortunes in France and a wife who was the most beautiful woman in Society, he and she served as Marcel Proust’s models for the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. Another deputy was Count Boni de Castellane, the dandy and arbiter of taste of his circle. Tall and slim, with pink skin, blue eyes and small neat golden moustache, he had married the dour American heiress Anna Gould, and with her dowry built a marble mansion furnished with precious antiques to exhibit the perfection that taste endowed by money could reach. At the party to celebrate its opening a footman in a scarlet cloak was stationed at the curve of the staircase, and when the Grand Duke Vladimir asked, “Who is that Cardinal over there?” the host replied, “Oh, he is only there to make an agreeable effect of color against the marble.” Count Boni’s assessment of the Affair was that the Jews “in their insensate desire to save a co-religionist” were arrogantly interfering with judicial process and simultaneously, or alternatively, were making Dreyfus “the pretext for a campaign against the Army which doubtless originated in Berlin.” In either case they were “insupportable to me.” This on the whole represented the view of the
gratin
, who in the words of a notable apostate among them, the Marquis de Galliffet, “continue to understand nothing.”

Some among them had literary or other distinctions. Comte Robert de Montesquiou, aesthete extraordinary, lavished on himself silks of lavender and gold, wrote elaborately symbolist poems and epitomized decadence to both Proust and Huysmans in their characters, the Baron de Charlus and des Esseintes. Montesquiou was what Oscar Wilde would have liked to have been if he had had more money, less talent and no humor. The Prince de Sagan, another notorious pederast who wore a perpetually fresh boutonniere and a perfectly waxed moustache, vied with his nephew, Count Boni, as the high priest of elegance and fought a duel with Abel Hermant, in whose satirical novels of the life of the rich and libertine he considered himself libelled. The Comtesse Anna de Noailles wrote poetry and glided through her lovely rooms in long white floating garments like “the ghost of something too beautiful to be real.” At her parties everything was required to focus on her. She did not trouble much about her guests, “merely smiled upon them when they arrived and softly sighed when she saw them going away.” The Comte de Vogüé, novelist and Academician, influenced the course of French literature by his studies of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevski which brought the great Russians to French attention.

These were the outstanding members. The bulk of the other one thousand or so who made up the
gratin
were chiefly distinguished, as one of them said, by “the certitude of a superiority that existed despite appearances to the contrary.” Comte Aimery de La Rochefoucauld was noted for “the almost fossil rigidity of his aristocratic prejudices.” Disgusted at improper protocol in a certain household, he said to a friend of his own level, “Let us walk home together and talk about rank.” Of the Duc de Luynes he remarked that his family were “mere nobodies in the year 1000.” Of the same breed was the Duc d’Uzès, whose ancestor, when the King expressed surprise that none of his family had ever been Marshal of France, replied, “Sire, we were always killed in battle too soon.”

The
gratin
were not hospitable; some families however wealthy “never offered so much as a glass of lemonade to their friends.” The men considered themselves the only ones of their sex who knew how to dress or make love and exchanged tributes from the famous courtesans. They took their orders from the ranking members of their class and were ardently Anglophile in manners and customs. The Greffulhes and Breteuils were intimates of the Prince of Wales,
le betting
was the custom at Longchamps,
le Derby
was held at Chantilly,
le steeplechase
at Auteuil and an unwanted member was
black-boulé
at the Jockey Club. Charles Haas, the original of Swann, had “Mr” engraved on his calling cards.

At the château of the Duc de Luynes at Dampierre, an English visitor found a veneer of modernity in the automobiles, the billiard room, the London clothes of the men and the chatter of women, “but under this thin glaze a deadness of the Dead Sea. All the books are safe under lock and key in the library outside the house. In the house there is no book, no newspaper, no writing paper and only one pen.” Two sisters—the Duchesses de Luynes and de Brissac—and their friend, the Comtesse de Vogüé, all on the point of becoming mothers, were “splendid creatures,” very easy to get on with if one talked of nothing but sport. The host was Lord Chamberlain to the current Pretender. Their kind “are children, arrested in intelligence, who hate Jews, Americans, the present, the past two centuries, the Government, the future and the fine arts.”